the creation of a media-type-specific
collection (such as an archive of public
Facebook content or You Tube videos);
associated hypotheticals in our surveys
tested varying limits on access;

Permission. In our early studies, open-ended questions revealed that some
participants thought permission was
the essential bridge to fair use, although
a legal approach to fair use does not require one to seek or obtain permission.
Our later studies tested the mitigating
force of permission with hypotheticals;
that is, if permission is sought or obtained, does it drastically change participants’ attitudes about reuse?; and

Venue and purpose. Our surveys used
hypotheticals to compare reuse of the
same content in varying contexts. For example, do participants’ attitudes change
if an Amazon book review is republished
on a blog, on Facebook, or on another
online bookstore? Because purpose may
be entwined with venue, hypotheticals
we spelled out in our studies specified
a similar purpose so participants would
judge them against the same baseline.
Of special note are the hypotheticals in
which user-contributed content is reused as data. This practice is common,
as personal information is analyzed to
draw conclusions about users as a group
or to target advertising. Reuse hypotheticals also distinguished between a positive or neutral purpose and a distinctly
negative purpose.

Our study results confirm the widely
held user expectation that attitudes
toward reuse crucially depend on circumstances and may stray far from
what is legally permissible under systematized U.S. fair-use provisions. 17
Aufdeheide et al.’s work with journalists1 shows that users’ stated attitudes
are often more conservative than the
law dictates, not less. Nonetheless, our
participants’ attitudes also confirmed
Fiesler’s and Bruckman’s observation4
of the emergence of a rich set of reuse
heuristics, norms, and self-policing
tactics within communities, as reuse
becomes not only commonplace but
lauded in the creative arena. 5

One of the more notable of our re-sults is derived from commercial reusehypotheticals, especially as they proposesocial media content that is reused asbig data. Big data is often used in aggre-gate to profile community behavior andindividually in personalization mecha-often disagreed with these imposedlimits. In an extreme case—a hypothet-ical that limited saving tweets to savingonly one’s own tweets—58% (100/173)of the participants disagreed at leastsomewhat. Figure 1a contrasts savingall tweets in a Twitter conversationand saving just one’s own tweets. Thatis, participants like the way content iscontrolled now; for example, if usersare downloading content and saving itto local storage, they should not be lim-ited to just the content they clearly own(such as photographs they have takenand posted, bon mots they have typed,or their own side of a conversation);instead, our study participants feel thenorm is unfettered saving.

There are exceptions to this rule
that also characterize norms associated with saving content. The strongest
effect stems from the introduction of
social networks. Participants respect
explicit boundaries set by their social
connections. While it seems perfectly
acceptable to save any content encountered on the open Web, once one
is inside Facebook, for example, different rules seem to apply. Our survey
participants expressed a strong negative reaction to the hypothetical that
one has the right to save the profile of
a friend of a friend, even given reasonable motivation for doing so. Figure 1b
contrasts one’s right to save one’s own
profile and friends list (197/244, or 81%,
agreed) with the right to save the equivalent content for one’s friends (only
74/244, or 30%, agreed). This reaction
is surprising, given the laissez-faire attitude about saving in general.

Two weaker effects also appeared inour survey results. First, saving to thecloud is viewed differently from savingto local storage. As a test, study partici-pants judged two hypotheticals thatdiffered only in where the downloadedcontent was stored. In the first, a re-corded job interview—a Skype-basedvideo—was stored to the user’s localhard drive and in the second to a cloudstorage service. In the first hypotheti-cal, 18% disagreed with an individual’sright to record the video and save it; inthe second, the disagreement jumpedto 30% (see Figure 1c.) Study partici-pants may feel local storage is more pri-vate than cloud storage or are perhapsconcerned that terms and conditionsgive one less control over the ultimatedisposition of the content. This effectmay diminish as people become ac-customed to cloud storage but may alsogrow if privacy breaches continue to bereported in the news.

A second effect stems from users’
expectations that certain media types
associated with communication will
remain ephemeral. Some of our study
participants were uncomfortable with
the idea that a conversation may be recorded and stored locally for an unspecified period, even without intimations of
reuse. Hypotheticals in a multiplayer-gaming scenario in one of our surveys
revealed that participants were generally undisturbed by the thought of players saving recordings of other players’
public avatar appearance, gestures, and
other movement we refer to as “activity”;
only 24/241, or 10%, disagreed with the
right to save this content. Comparable
recordings of public in-game conversations were regarded more skeptically;
58/241, or 24%, disagreed with the right
to save this content. Communication
carried on in public still carries with
it an expectation of ephemerality that
could change as standards for recording
others in public grow increasingly lax.

Reusing Social Media

Reuse is one of the more contentious
aspects of current legal interpretation
of copyright and fair use. Some major
social media sites (such as YouTube)
receive numerous take-down notices
for content that copyright owners feel
has been inappropriately reused or reposted. Meanwhile, as Tehranian predicted in 2007, 22 nuanced social norms
have evolved to handle reuse of different media types and genres in a variety
of circumstances.

Our reuse scenarios and hypotheticals examined at least eight features:
the five described earlier—original
context, the user’s relationship to the
content, commercial concerns, genre-derived properties, and disaggregation
of constituent content—plus three additional concepts salient to reuse:

Public good. Public good scenarios
seek a balance between individual
rights (such as to privacy and to be forgotten) and the countervailing public
interest (such as the right to preserve,
access, and reuse historical content).
Each of our studies included an insti-tutional-archiving scenario that posits